Introduction
Ninth Letter is delighted to present the hilarious and yet compellingly profound “10 Dimensions of Reality,” an excerpt from Joseph Skibell’s forthcoming novel, Dr. Bopstein and the U.S. Dept. of Dreaming (Panhandler Books).
—Philip Graham, Editor-at-Large
In order to prepare yourself, dear three-dimensional reader, to encounter an additional seven dimensions, here is some helpful context from the author:
In 1966, Dizzy Gillespie’s manager has signed a lucrative and magical contract with the Disney Studios.
The contract has changed Dizzy’s name to Disney Gillespi.
The contract also forces him to play only music from the Disney catalogue.
Finally, it has brought his trumpet, Dr. Bopstein, to life as a sidekick.
Dizzy, unable to deal with these contract-bound changes to his artistic life, has decided to drive from New York to LA in December of 1966 in his Kaiser-Darrin to confront Walt Disney himself.
Many years later Dr. Bopstein, the novel’s narrator, writes his book of this adventure from inside his glass exhibition case at the Smithsonian Institute in 2024-ish. A Jewish trumpet (manufactured in Brooklyn), Dr. Bopstein’s real name is Isadore Goldberg. When Diz asked him earlier in the book why, if he’s Jewish, he speaks in such “a jivey patois,” Bop answers him: “I work in jazz, man. I’m just trying to blend in with the cats.” Dr. Bopstein is also under the impression that instruments are the true musicians and that musicians are mere stagehands.
Here is Dr. Bopstein’s description of the first time he emerges animate (and “utterly transformed!”) from his trumpet case:
My main slide, the central and largest of my cylinders, seemed to be serving me as some kind of spine, while the other three slides, curving around, looked to be working as limbs. My bell, which was tilted up at a ninety-degree angle like an ancient ram’s horn, was curved around and positioned, like a mouth, underneath the three buttons of my piston valves, two of which seemed to be functioning as my eyes and the middle one of which seemed to be functioning as my nose.
10 Dimensions of Reality
If y’all remember from about 200 pages ago, I’d asked Bird about it, and all he could do was shrug, and I got to be honest with y’all, it’s bothered me ever since. Not like all the time or every day, but off and on, and every now and then. Whenever I’m animate, it’s been like an itch I couldn’t scratch, until one day, not too long ago, this hipster cat glided into the instrument section down here at the Smithsonian.
The dude was just browsing around, looking at the various instruments in our glass cases, never, I’m sure, imagining the hunger and sorrow we were all feeling in our separate ways, and I understand that’s just the way it is with y’all human beings, y’all are just a little species-supremacist, it’s not that you’re bad or evil people, it’s just that most of y’all have never experienced anything in this world as alive other than yourselves.
Still, I could tell just by looking at this dude that he was a real head, if you’re hip to my drift. Kind of looked like the god Pan, by which I mean half-goat/half-man, with a curly head of short hair and a curly beard, both with just a glint of silver filigreed through them. His legs were short, and his barreled chest was all decked out in an expensive tied-dyed t-shirt underneath a velvet paisley vest, and then, of course, there were the two fairly sizable gauges in his earlobes and the malachite of his piercing green eyes.
He looked like someone you might run into passing out LSD at Burning Man, which, as it turns out, is something this cat actually does!
“Psst! Hey, you! Yeah, you!” I called out to him, and thank God, he was the only one in the exhibition hall at the time. He turned to look over his shoulder, searching for the voice that was addressing him, and so, I felt emboldened to call out a little louder, “Over here, my man! In this motherfucking exhibition case!”
“Ah, dude,” the cat said, squatting down and looking through the glass at me. “What’re you doing, bro, all locked up inside of there?”
“Precisely, yeah,” I told him. “Though I don’t want to get all bitter about it. Things could be worse. Still, you know how it is, you make a major contribution to the arts and culture of your day, you play your motherfucking heart out, you give it your all, and what do they do? They stick you in a goddamned museum, and one day, they’ll stick that museum in another goddamned museum, and then no one’ll ever hear from you again!”
“That’s whack, man,” this cat—I’ll call him Khalil J.—said. “No cap, z’ere anything I can do for you? Because like, dawg, that’s a big F in the chat, in’it?”
I just want to point out, in case you didn’t realize it, children, that this Khalil dude wasn’t freaking out to be talking this way to a quote unquote inanimate object. Naw, that cat was connected, that was something I saw in him right away, he understood that it’s all energy, some of it just moves a little faster than the rest.
“Anything you can do for me? Man, that’s exactly what I was hoping you’d say.”
However, just as we were about to get down to taxed brass, and I mean at that very moment, who should walk in, but J. Reyes, yeah, you know who I mean, that guard who FaceTimes with her grandkids all through the night.
“Please, sir,” she told Khalil, “there’s no touching the exhibition cases.”
“Oh, right, sorry, miss.” He took a step back and, straightening up, smiled at her, and when I say smiled at her, children, I mean he gave her his best god-of-wine-and-debauchery smile, all Dionysian and shit, and next thing you know—and I couldn’t believe this myself—but J. Reyes was smiling shyly back, and it did kind of make me wonder what J. Reyes’ actual life was like.
“Hey! Hey! Hey!” I said, after she’d stepped out of the room with her Timberland PROs, these big, humungous cop boots, squeaking across the polished floors, Khalil admiring that long satin stripe that ran up and down her brown polyester security guard pants. “This isn’t about her, dude! Now pay attention. This is about me!” I said. “And yeah, I know, there’s something about a chick all locked up real tight inside a law enforcement uniform, even if she is a granny, but concentrate on me for a millisecond here, won’t you?”
“My bad, bro. Yeah, yeah. It’s just I never seen a woman with roses in her aura before. But like, where were we?”
“Well, I was hoping you might be able to, you know, hook me up.”
“Sure, bro, I could do that. What exactly you interested in?”
“You ever hear of 10-Dimensional Reality?”
“Schew, man!” he whistled through his teeth.
“Yeah!” I said it in a way to emphasize the profundity of what I was telling him. “Well, I’m up to speed on the first four, but completely in the dark concerning the remaining six.”
“S’gonna run you about three.”
“Don’t worry about that, man.”
“Which is reasonable, dude.”
“I’ll find it someplace.”
There’s probably that much, I figured, in Diz’s Stagehands Union pension fund, and maybe no one will notice if 3K goes missing.
“Okay, then, we’ll start you out with a little amuse-bouche of MDMA, just to soften up the amygdala.”
“One of which I do not have.”
“Followed by a little breadbasket of ketamine in case you’re suffering any despair.”
“Despair? Look where I am, bro!”
“Plus, it’ll relax your heart rate.”
“Again, one of which I do not have.”
“And then, judging from your size, I’d say we go anywhere from three and a half to five grams of Jamaican-grown. Golden Teacher or Albino Penis Envy suit?”
“Any of this legal?”
“The ketamine,” he said with a little concession-making shrug. “For now. The rest of it will be in about two years. Have you noticed: as they’re taking away more and more of our civil rights, they’ve been giving us better and better drugs.”
“All right, I’m in. I mean, what can they do to me? I’m already locked up on government property in a glass exhibition case.”
“But how do I get into the museum after hours?”
Now that was the easy part. We agreed that Khalil would come back the next day and hide in one of the bathrooms right before closing time, then we’d meet up in a back storeroom, where I knew there were no alarms or security cameras.
And so, right after five on that day, I liberated myself from my glass exhibition case, and I made my way to the storage room, playing a game of Limbo beneath the red security lasers, which wasn’t hard for someone of my compact stature. I’m not sure what I would have done if, say, I were a bass fiddle. Enlightenment, under those circumstances, might have been outside my reach.
Sure enough, Khalil was waiting for me right there, just as we’d planned. He’d laid out a little yoga mat with bedding on it, alongside a set of pillowy eyeshades. He handed me a bowl of shrooms and chocolate drizzled with honey, and I commenced ingesting them immediately, sitting cross-legged on the bedding.
He began playing this trippy playlist, filled with all this new-age tripe I won’t go into a critique of right now. Suffice it to say, I put on the eyeshades or, in my case, the valve-shades, and before I knew it, I was back in that same psychic landscape I remembered being in from my involuntary acid trip nearly 60 years ago.
And to be honest with y’all, kiddios, I didn’t realize how much I missed that place!
The visuals were extraordinary, a series of futuristic and cubistic landscapes, all dissolving and overlaying on top of one another, purple and green being the principal colors, but I knew I didn’t have time to groove on any of that.
Naw, man, I was here on business!
“Take me to the holy Alef!” I commanded the shrooms.
But you know how shrooms are, or maybe you don’t, they’re all playful and flirtatious and coy, chittering and chattering away, and they completely avoided the issue.
Still, I was dead-set on my agenda, and after Khalil slipped me an extra gram about 90 minutes in, damn if “los niños,” as Khalil referred to them, didn’t take me exactly where I wanted to go, right to that empty cloudy field Charlie Parker had been in in the Supernal Realms. In fact, I found myself lying on the Baroness’ red leather sofa, which I guess had been sitting out there since Bird ascended to Heaven on it, and to tell you the truth, it did look a little worse for the wear, having been left out, since 1955, in that all ice and snow and rain.
And standing in the orchard across from it—I was surprised to see this—was the Supernal Alef, its three sections made out of what appeared to be slabs of pure transparent marble. The whole thing was aglow with electrons and neurons spinning around it, and it was giving off this weird electronic hum.
“Welcome, Isadore,” a very stentorian Voice addressed me.
Now, this was no longer los cheerful niños chattering and chittering away, but a presence, the Presence, as far as I was concerned, and that’s the only way I can describe the Being whose voice seemed to be broadcasting from inside that holy rune.
I sat up and took off my shades so I could see it with my naked valves. The Alef, the very same Alef I’d seen at the end of my acid trip, way back in 1966, was so tall, it seemed to be looming way up high in the sky above me, and the Voice that sounded from within it was deep and resonant, and each time it spoke, thunderclaps and green lightning bolts seem to shoot out from all sides of the Alef, and these ignited the trees surrounding it in the Orchard and made their leafy crowns burst into song.
“You wished to see us?” the Presence demanded.
“I … I mean … I did, yes,” I said, my piping all atremble, and to tell y’all the truth, if my spit valve had been opened and I had only been recently played, well, I would have been spitting in my pants, not that I wore any, of course.
“Well, we are here, as are you, and there’s no need to be frightened,” the Presence boomed out, accompanied by thunder blasts and lightning bolts, the leafy canopies crackling and bursting into more resonant flames or more flaming songs.
I have to say, it was quite intimidating. Nevertheless, I stammered out my reply. “Yes, your Excellency. I mean, your Honor—I mean, thank you, your Alefship.”
“Let us make one thing perfectly clear, Isadore.”
“Yes?”
“We are not the Alef!” the Presence thundered.
“No?”
“But merely its steward.”
“I see.”
“And now, tell us, Isadore: what is it you are here for?”
I sat up and leaned forward. “Oh. Well,” I said, still trying to calm what, if I had one, would have been my heart. “I was just wondering, you know, if you could kindly explain to me what the Ten Dimensions of Reality are.”
“The WHAT!” the Presence roared to the accompaniment of more lightning bolts and thunderclaps, with the trees singing an even more glorious rendition of the chorus from Beethoven’s Ninth.
“The … the … the Ten Dimensions of Reality!” I said, trying to shout over the music. “It’s apparently something Charlie Parker never got to know about!”
“Ah, Poor Parker,” the Presence said, and it seemed to sigh deeply. “How’s that Little Motherfucker been anyway? Haven’t seen him up here for a while.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “All I know is that cat was hungry for this knowledge, and you can starve with a spiritual hunger left unsatisfied for so long.”
“All right, Isadore,” the Presence said as the thunderclaps and green lightning bolts and the choir of burning trees all rolled up to a big crescendo, “let’s do this for Bird’s sake then. Are you prepared?”
“I am. The only thing I ask of you …”
“YES?”
“… is please don’t terrify me!”
The Presence was silent for a moment. “Well, all right,” it finally said, “I suppose we can tone down the theatrics,” and almost immediately the thunder and the lightning ceased, and the flaming trees doused the fire of their song.
“I appreciate that, sir and, or … madam.”
“All right. Now, please pay attention, as I’m only going to say this once.” The Presence seemed to clear its throat. “As is well-known, all Creatures of the Lower Chambers live in four dimensions.”
“Right, right. Three of Space and one of Time. Everybody and his dog …”
“Well, maybe not his dog.”
“… knows that.”
“But for human beings, or for Little Motherfuckers, as we call them up here, it’s completely different. Human consciousness—that neural epiphenomenal cotton candy somehow firing above a human brain—throws what one might call a homo sapiens wrench into the works. You see, Isadore, self-reflecting consciousness is like an arcade of funhouse mirrors. No matter where one looks, no matter how unrecognizable the form, one always seems to be looking at oneself. You’d imagine, for example, that there is nothing more solid, more physically real, than the six directions of Space, am I correct?”
“And by that, I assume you mean up/down, east/west, north/south?”
“Yes, but even there, you see, those Little Motherfuckers tend to place their own egoic selves right in the middle of it all. In actual fact, there is no east. When one says ‘east,’ what one really means is ‘east of me,’ and ‘west,’ so-called, is ‘west of me.’ You need only move a mile to the west, and that mile which once was in the ‘west’ is now somehow miraculously in the ‘east.’ It’s the same with time. Anything that temporally precedes ‘me’ is in the past, and anything that ‘I’ precede is in the future. It’s curious, don’t you think? How these Little Motherfuckers place themselves at the very center of Time and Space, when most of them have absolutely no idea where they actually are.”
“Yeah, man,” I could only say, thinking back to all the years I spent with Diz, “that resonates.”
“Parenthetically, it’s the same with their names. It’s so quaint, really. In order to distinguish themselves from everyone else, they each refer to themselves by the same exact name: I.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said, kind of hearing it for the first time, “that is kind of weird.”
“However, beyond the four dimensions of Time and Space, there is a Fifth Dimension, and in that Fifth Dimension, Isadore, ‘I’ is no longer the measure of all things.”
“‘I’ isn’t?”
“‘I’ is not.”
“And what is this Fifth Dimension?”
“It’s the dimension of Morality. Plants and animals don’t live in Five-Dimensional reality. Only those Little Motherfuckers we call human beings do, and here’s the thing about the Fifth Dimension of Morality, it places the ‘I’ in relationship to all other ‘I’s.’ And so, instead of one point of definitional consciousness dividing East from West or Past from Future, now there are at least two points of definitional consciousness on the spectrum: I and You. And of course, that’s why the Little Motherfuckers resist the notion of Good and Evil so completely. Wishing it away with their Four-Dimensional narcissism, they turn it into an opinion: instead of good and evil, they speak of good and bad. Or they turn it into a sensation, speaking of pleasure and pain, in this way turning a blind ‘I’ once again to one another.
“Because Good and Evil require an additional metric, you see. In both human and divine law, I am not ‘I,’ unless you are also ‘I.’ In the Fifth Dimension of Morality, I must simultaneously be ‘I’ and ‘you,’ while you must simultaneously be ‘you’ and ‘I,’ and therefore, if something is not morally good for ‘you,’ it cannot be morally good for ‘I’ either. And too often, as I’m sure you’ll agree, what ‘I’ calls good is simply the evil ‘I’ perpetuates on ‘you.’
“And so, a third point of definitional consciousness comes into existence on the spectrum of the Fifth Dimension and, unlike the ‘I’ that is definitional on the first Four, this point of consciousness is ‘we.’”
“Oh, man, you’re like flipping my lid for realz!” was all I could say, and I had to lay back on the Baroness’ red leather sofa and curl up in a sort of fetal position.
“All right, Isadore, sit up. We must hurry along now. Psilocybin, like life itself, doesn’t last forever, and you wanted to know these things.”
I did as I was told, calmed by the silent song the Alef was now singing in the middle of its Orchard. “All right. Onto the Sixth Dimension!”
“Now listen closely. The Sixth Dimension is the dimension of Human Significance.”
“Human Significance?”
“Well, you may include yourself here, or any being with self-reflecting consciousness.”
“Thank you. I feel included.”
“And you see, because of the Fifth Dimension of Good and Evil, every act performed by a conscious being inside the four dimensions of Time and Space is ultimately significant, as it kicks Creation, like a tin can, down the road, either towards or away from the light.”
“Uh-hunh. Towards or away from the light. I’m digging it.”
(Although I was also beginning to worry that I probably should have been taking notes.)
The Presence continued: “Human beings, you see …”
“Or a horn brought to life.”
“… exactly, are more than just the brains cells of the planet. They are to the planet what consciousness is to the brain. They are the planet’s consciousness, all connected in a noospherical web, and naturally, therefore, every act a sentient being performs is of ultimate significance.”
“It makes sense when you put it that way. Human Significance. Got it. And the Seventh Dimension?”
“The Seventh Dimension,” the Presence said, and I thought I heard it laugh a little privately to itself, “is Human Insignificance.”
“Oh, but I thought you just said …”
“Oh, come on now, Isadore! It’s absurd to think that anything a human being does has any effect at all. Please! What intolerable hubris! Those Little Motherfuckers—or the Children of Darkness, as we sometimes also refer to them up here—are born, live and die, barely understanding any of it. I mean, how much of a human life can even the person living it remember? Practically none! Some of them can’t even remember what they had for dinner the night before! Or what happened on that one and only trip to Italy. I mean, let’s face it. Most human lives leave no trace and are ultimately forgotten, almost as soon as that life is over, if not before.”
I folded what, if I had them, would have been my arms in confusion. “So, significance and insignificance is a spectrum, then, like North and South?”
“Not at all! No, it’s not like East and West, my little friend, it’s not relative to some imaginary central point residing—unsurprisingly and conveniently enough—in the human ego. No, any act that is performed in Time and Space, for Good or Ill, is not relatively significant or insignificant, but is rather simultaneously significant and insignificant.”
“If I weren’t tripping my bottom valve caps off, I think the contradictions might boggle what basically functions as my mind.”
“And now?”
“And now, I’m afraid it’s making absolute sense to me. What you’re saying is, it’s not a spectrum. It’s two separate and simultaneously lived dimensions of reality …”
“Well, all ten of the dimensions are lived simultaneously.”
“… so that everything a sentient being does, including a trumpet brought to life by the strange synergy of an entertainment contract and the inadvertent use of psychedelics, is simultaneously significant and insignificant.”
“Correct.”
“Wow, so every good or evil act performed in Time and Space is simultaneously significant and insignificant in terms of sentient beings.”
“Correct.”
“I prefer that term to ‘human.’”
“Duly noted.”
“Okay, so, that’s seven down and three to go.”
“Are you sure you can take this, my friend? Most Little Motherfuckers can’t.”
“There ain’t no going back now, man.”
“Well, in that case, the Eighth Dimension is, of course, Cosmic Insignificance.”
“I had a feeling we’d arrive there eventually.”
“If nothing you Little Motherfuckers do has any human significance, then how could your lives possibly have any cosmic significance? And of course, the word cosmic is just a politically correct euphemism for the word divine, a word and concept woefully anathema to the scientific and materialist age in which you find yourself currently quote unquote living.
“But dig this, my little friend. Human beings wage their wars, they enslave one another, they poison their one and only planet, etc., etc., telling themselves that God takes note, that God takes sides, that God is affected by their human idiocies, the little pointless dance they each perform, individually and collectively, each in their mere 30,000 days of life, a third of which they spend in sleep, a tenth of which, if they’re lucky, they spend eating, and a smaller portion of which they spend in the bathroom, before disappearing completely.”
The Presence laughed sadly. “I mean, what is a human being, but a snarled tangle of matter and ghost whose life story, no matter how beautiful or ugly, is written on water. And—oh!—how very absurd it is to imagine that anything a human being does has any effect on the Cosmos. The human dogs bark, as it were, and the Divine Chariot moves on, untouched, unmoved, unsullied by your ridiculous antics, unmarred by the silliness of your petty human concerns.”
“Damn, man, but that’s dark.”
“Which lead us, as you’re no doubt anticipating, to the Ninth Dimension.”
“Which is?”
“Cosmic Significance.”
“Whew!” was all I could say, and I left like laughing and crying both.
“I mean, how could it be otherwise?” the Presence whispered to me. “Humankind is the only place, so to speak, in the universe where free will is possible, the only place, therefore, where actions actually matter. At the same time that your efforts are cosmically and, we might add, comically unimportant, they are, in fact, the only thing that has any effect on the Divine at all. Human goodness—love, clarity, charity, kindness—is, in the end, all that matters anywhere.”
“So that every good and evil act we perform in Time and Space is humanly as well as cosmically insignificant and significant simultaneously!”
“Are you digging it, my man?”
“Consider it dug.”
“Well, moving on then to the 10th Dimension …”
“All right, let me just brace myself for it,” I said, gripping the leather of the Baroness’ sofa with both of my hands.
“The 10th Dimension, of course, is Timelessness and Spacelessness. In fact, there’s so little ‘less’ in it, you could even think of it as Lesslessness. It’s absolute nothing.”
“Or might we call it the eternal little silent love song of the Alef?”
“Well, if you wish to call it that, fine, but as we think we told your pal Bird, there’s a loneliness at the heart of Creation that Creation was meant to assuage, and when that loneliness is finally met with sufficient love, the Nine Dimensions will all roll up, dimension by dimension, as it were, into the 10th Dimension that will then, at least as far as human consciousness is concerned, disappear, so that even the eternal song of the Alef lasts only for a little while. Is that clear?”
“More than clear.”
“Well, but then, why are you crying, my friend?”
I reached up and was surprised to feel the tears that were falling from my valves. “I don’t know. I don’t know why,” I said.
And the Presence was silent for a moment.
“Well,” it finally spoke, “I suppose it’s a trumpet’s job to weep and wail, and to sound the alarm.”
Joseph Skibell is the Winship Distinguished Research Professor in Humanities at Emory University, where he directs the Creative Writing Program. He is the author of A Blessing on the Moon, The English Disease, A Curable Romantic, My Father’s Guitar & Other Imaginary Things, Six Memos from the Last Millennium: A Novelist Reads the Talmud, and Dr. Bopstein and the U.S. Dept. of Dreaming. Skibell’s stories, essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, LitHub, Tablet, the Utne Reader, Fretboard Journal, Acoustic Guitar, and many other publications. He has received numerous awards, including the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Sami Rohr Prize and the Turner Prize. He lives in Atlanta and Tesuque, New Mexico.
